Immortals After Dark 01 - The Warlord Wants Forever

were silver and her lips were curling into a smile.

    He stared, still disbelieving. “Like that, did you?”

    She nodded.

    “Want more?” he asked as he tossed her on the bed.

    In answer, she went to her knees, pulled aside her hair and offered him the unbitten side of her neck.

    His voice was ragged with lust. “That wasn’t quite what I meant, but we can work something out….”

    The more hours toward dawn that they spent licking, fucking and both of them biting, the more overwhelming the mind-boggling pleasure—the less he could believe that this was his Bride, happily—no, aggressively—partaking.

    And at the end of the night, he stared down at her in puzzlement. He didn’t know which facet of her he liked better. The siren in black satin that made his cock and fangs ache or this angel with her bright red hair spread across his pillow—who made his chest ache.

    She brushed the backs of her fingers along his face. “Wroth, I want this to grow naturally between us without the chain,” she whispered up to him. “Vow you’ll give it back in two weeks time. Just give us a chance, give me a chance to want this freely.”

    He wanted to believe in her—and in himself, that he could convince her to stay. He’d already wanted to command her to close her eyes and open her palms, and then see her face once he’d poured the chain into them.

    Two weeks to win her. “Yes, milaya, I vow it.”

    Nothing in his human life or his vampire existence had prepared him for living with a Valkyrie.

    Myst had boundless energy, she was powerful, and she exuded an almost otherworldly sensuality that set his blood on fire. Each night he traced her to different locations to make love to her. He’d had her against the foot of a pyramid, gazed in awe as she rode him on a moonlit beach in Greece , licked her sex beneath a redwood until she begged for mercy….

    Throughout those nights, once he and Myst had worked the edge off their need, they talked for hours and he learned more about her and her kind. He’d given her the cross she’d admired at Oblak, but when the jewels glinted in their room’s gaslight, she’d seemed to go into a trance. Finally, he’d covered it, and once she’d shaken herself, she’d admitted, “We all inherited Freya’s acquisitiveness. Shining things, jewels and gems…We can’t tear our gaze away without training for years and sudden glittering is sometimes irresistible.”

    Wroth had inwardly cursed that she had this vulnerability. He’d thought the Valkyrie were an almost perfect creature—no need to eat, immortal, strengthening with age—but he’d since learned that they were one of the few species of the Lore that could die of sorrow. And if one was weakened the others suffered since they were all connected with a “collective” power.

    He couldn’t always be there to protect her. Though he’d tried to use the chain as little as possible, he’d whispered to her as she slept that she would no longer have these weaknesses.

    Wroth would have been content to hear only about her, but she’d been surprisingly curious about his past. He found himself revealing things he never had to anyone, yet feeling unburdened from it.

    He’d told her of the pain he and Murdoch had felt to return home and see their other six siblings and their father dying of plague. Myst’s eyes had watered as he’d spoken of the gut-wrenching decision to make them drink. Then came the agonizing vigil as they wondered if their family would be reborn, any of them. In the end, they’d lost their father and sisters, but regained their two brothers.

    The night he himself had “died” seemed to fascinate her, and she repeatedly asked him to tell her the story of how he’d made demands of Kristoff. She never failed to tell him how proud she was of him. That comment had made him feel particularly uneasy. These days there wasn’t much he was proud about. He avoided Kristoff, telling him little when they did meet. He was coercing his Bride to stay with him, and he suspected that if, at the end of the two weeks, she wanted to leave him, he’d break his vow to her in a heartbeat’s time.

    He sought any hint that might tell him how she felt and what she might decide. At times he was optimistic. When they fought mock battles with a game based on military strategy, she seemed to enjoy herself—and to like the fact that he always beat her. She wasn’t a strategist, she’d explained to him. She was